Plickers for Fun, Fast Assessment

Every once in awhile a piece of technology comes along that makes me say, "Wow.  Awesome."  Plickers is just that.  In the past, in order to get responses from students in a classroom setting in an anonymous way you had to buy expensive clicker systems, which usually stayed in the closet because the teacher didn't want to trouble with setting them all up.  But with the advent of phones and iPads with cameras and QR codes the game has change.

Along comes Plickers, a neat and easy way to gather real-time data on your students' responses to your questions using your iOS or Android device.  Each students gets a piece of paper that can be laminated and put on a popsicle stick, if you wish.  The paper has a giant QR code on it that is unique to them and can be rotated in four ways to give whichever answer the student wants.  Just casually looking at the paper another student would not be able to decipher the student's response, so anonymity is high, which is great for the classroom safety.  Your camera picks up each student's response and captures the data.  It can then be viewed instantly to gather the pulse of your classroom.  You can later look at the results in more detailed reports.  Check out the video below:

I also had trouble downloading the PDF files of the papers to print out so the company emailed them to me to share with you